Category: Science

Scientific publisher Sage Journals has retracted three papers on abortion—including a controversial 2021 study on mifepristone, the medication at the center of a US legal battle. The 2021 study found that mifepristone, one of two pills used in a medication abortion, significantly increased the risk of women going to the emergency room following an abortion. […]

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Driverless cars and planes are no longer the stuff of the future. In the city of San Francisco alone, two taxi companies have collectively logged 8 million miles of autonomous driving through August 2023. And more than 850,000 autonomous aerial vehicles, or drones, are registered […]

The reason for the Jones Act’s longevity, says Colin Grabow, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, is that while it tends to benefit only a few people and businesses, the act goes unnoticed because there are many payers sharing the increased costs. The Jones Act is one in a string […]

“The restaurant dinners we held at China Chilcano in Washington, DC last summer went extremely well,” wrote Eat Just’s director of global communications, Carrie Kabat, in an emailed statement to WIRED. “We plan to resume these dinners this year.” Good Meat/Eat Just’s chicken had also previously been on sale in Singapore, but sales there have […]

But the solar system contains more than two masses. In fact, it started as a big cloud of dust without any planets and without the sun, and every speck of dust had an attractive interaction with every other speck. That’s a lot of complicated stuff going on, but there’s a trick we can use to […]

Now some key patents have expired, and the US Food and Drug Administration has paved the way for biosimilar versions of insulin—so-called because they’re almost identical to another product already on the market. For a product to be biosimilar, it must be highly similar in structure to the original and work just as well in […]

Science teachers in many states are currently updating their lessons to incorporate the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)—a set of teaching guidelines that encourage educators to place more emphasis on how science is used in the real world. AFBFA funding documents show that the foundation intends to use the adoption of the NGSS as an […]

Stretching thousands upon thousands of miles under your feet, a web of fibrous ears is listening. Whether you walk over buried fiber optics or drive a car across them, above-ground activity creates a characteristic vibration that ever-so-slightly disturbs the way light travels through the cables. With the right equipment, scientists can parse that disturbance to […]

Elon Musk said on the social media platform X on Monday that the first human patient has received a brain implant developed by his company Neuralink. After years of delays, Neuralink started recruiting patients for a clinical trial in the fall after receiving approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and a hospital ethics […]

“The very reason that we have magnetism in our everyday lives is because of the strength of electron exchange interactions,” said study coauthor Ataç İmamoğlu, a physicist also at the Institute for Quantum Electronics. However, as Nagaoka theorized in the 1960s, exchange interactions may not be the only way to make a material magnetic. Nagaoka […]